Arturo J. Aldama, Peter J. GarciaWe find that when Arizona is brought up many scholars, educational and immigration rights activists across the U.S. just shrug and say “Arizona is crazy” or ”that is Arizona for you”. However we strongly believe that Arizona is a bas-relief to a matrix of racialized biopower that seeks to criminalize and denigrate subjects based on fear-driven paranoia about indigenous and mestiza/o peoples.

Roberto Cintli RodriguezOver the past several years, Arizona has unquestionably become synonymous with reactionary politics and reactionary anti-Mexican, anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous legislation. Arizona’s image has been further tarnished during the past few years by being home to Operation Streamline in Tucson.

Arturo J. AldamaFor all those perceived as illegal, even if their ancestry predates by several generations the arrival of European immigrants, how do we read their harassment, deportation, assumption of illegality? Is this also a predictable outcome of the processes of nativism? Your racialized construction trumps claims to indigenous identity and ancestry?

Peter J. GarciaThe neoconservative backlash against civil rights and social justice is attempting to criminalize Mexican immigrants and is threatened by any form of decolonial activism or liberation movements that might have prevented the social implosion occurring in Arizona.

Doreen MartinezWhen it came to light that Mr. Loughner failed to have any formal political memberships, a shift away from the deeper connection he embodied occurred and one veil of the borderlands was achieved. Therein is a critical failure to understand Jared’s racial and gender entitlements e.g., his context or what we could refer to as his borderland status.

Alberto “Beto” GutierrezUnfortunately, the paradigm of race has been historically framed as a Black and White relation, overlooking more subtle forms of anti-Mexican, anti-Chinese, anti-Japanese, and anti-Native American local and national legislation and public policy.

Christopher GonzalezAs cool as it may sound, no one in America should want to be a machine. To be a machine means you are expendable and exploitable. It means that you are just a number and that there are a hundred more behind you who are ready, willing, and able to do the kind of work you do. It means having a devalued sense of self-worth and adopted fatalism that speaks to your contribution to the world as being transient. We need to conceive of strategies that limit this sort of thinking in the Chicano/a community which aspires to move thinking beyond the attributes of labor.

Nohemy Solórzano-Thompson, Tia K. ButlerIn this article, we discuss the symbolic and material forms this war against immigrants manifests itself in the United States. Using the films of Danny Trejo and most importantly what happens to his body in these films, we posit that it is possible to read the multiple forms anti-immigrant sentiments are performed and enacted in American popular culture since the late 80s.

Rebecca BeucherAn overarching theme throughout these pieces is a recognition that theorizing about race and racial formations themselves have become increasingly complicated by the restructuring of economies through globalization; however, this argument aims to reveal that despite this restructuring, racism seems to have adapted to this changed world to work to oppress people in much the same way that it has in the past.

Geoffrey Boyce and Sarah LauniusLaws like SB 1070 are meant to divide people from one another by reifying fear, distrust and violent the exclusion of some. The We Reject Racism campaign worked to directly confront this process through cross-sector organizing that undermined pre-existing divisions in our communities and worked to mitigate the impacts of the law.

Jason Ferreira is authorDuring the hot summer month of June 2011, Jason Ferreira, Assistant Professor of Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University, joined with a multiracial group of his students to travel to the Arizona borderlands. Organized as the Eyes on Arizona Collective, they volunteered with No More Deaths, a non-profit organization who labors “to end death and suffering on the Mexico/U.S. border,” and built relationships with diverse community-based organizations engaged in dynamic social/racial justice work in Tucson (such as Tierra y Libertad, U.N.I.D.O.S, and artist-activists like Alex Garza and Carlos Valenzuela on the Pascua Yaqui reservation).